


Hate

by Nvos



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Gore, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 19:57:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12801216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nvos/pseuds/Nvos
Summary: Khada Jhin, a stagehand plagued by nightmares and ghastly visions, finally confronts their source at the end of a fillet blade.





	Hate

**Author's Note:**

> While not a first chapter, I plan on posting several works relating to the early career history of my interpretation of Khada Jhin. Note for explicit gore and violence below.

“Are you listening to me, Jhin?”

“What?”

_Huff._ “I said…”

“Yes, I’m listening to you,” Jhin answered, not having heard him. “I don’t want to go back to camp this early.”

“What? Why?”

Jhin rolled his eyes. “It’s not late enough. What do you think they’ll think, that we were trying our best when the sun hasn’t even set?”

“It’s late enough.”

“I’m pushing the cart.”

“You said—”

“I said that because _I had to_. When was the last time you had the cart and weren’t tired by the time we reached Kaijn’s gates, for the Divine’s sakes?”

Hiro’s head lowered in contemplation. Jhin waved him aside, glare keenly _don’t answer that._

“Where do you want to go? The cart isn’t exactly mobile.”

“Just leave it on the road. No-one wants to steal a flyer cart that’s nothing but wood and paper.”

“If you say so…”

Jhin ignored him the rest of the way.

They stopped at a forested bend in the road, conifers forward and hawking. Jhin noticed the quiet glitter of a stream in the distance and hung up the cart, dull pain now sharpened to an edge on his back.

“I’m going to freshen up,” he muttered with the barest intention for Hiro to hear. Freshen up, of course, meant dunking his head in the water repeatedly if only to cherish sensation on his face. Jhin strode off, expecting Hiro to be enough of a coward to guard what Jhin knew was worthless.

Perhaps Hiro thought he couldn’t believe him. Perhaps he figured the cart was worthless after all— for the instant Jhin turned around while cradling himself at the ravine’s edge, Hiro was there, looking at him with a face smushed such that it gave any sense vertigo.

He glowered.

“Don’t look at me that way,” Hiro said. He sat down and crawled to a pace beside Jhin, splashing water towards himself.

Jhin said nothing and merely watched, in an instant learning to despise the jerking motions of Hiro’s hands and the puffy manner of speaking he had as though stung by a thousand bees. Maybe he was always like that, an allergy to being born. Jhin spared him from no scorn.

At last, after a minute or so of staring, Jhin wrested his head away from Hiro and let water rush over his forehead and then his mouth. He closed his eyes and fostered a semblance of peace.  
Hiro spoke again— serenity shattered.

“I’m sorry for what I said last night. I wasn’t thinking. You’re… not my type, Jhin, I realize that now. I think I’m just jealous for your confidence.”

_Every time you speak I want to skin you._

“It’s nothing important,” Jhin curtly replied. “Brazen, but unimportant.”

Hiro paused. “You have a fiancee…”

_Every._ Jhin pulled himself out of the water now.

“… I never thought that of you …”

_Time._ He didn’t feel his hand reaching into his clothes.

“… but I guess it makes sense …”

_You._ The blade twisted steel.

“… given the way you are.”

_**SPEAK.**_

A moment. A pause. Discourse behind the screen. Murmuring.

Khada Jhin was about two inches away from skewering Yagami Hiro into nothing more than a puddle of organs.

“Hey…” Hiro stammered, gesturing at the edge. “That’s your fillet knife, right? Don’t point that at me.”

Jhin heard nothing over the buzzing.

“I’m going to visit _her_ again when you’re dead and I’ve stolen your identity to purchase property in Kaijn for us to live in,” Jhin told him.

Hiro kept looking at the knife. “Really. I’m sorry, Jhin, I mean it. I didn’t realize how much she means to you… put that knife away.”

“Have you ever noticed your head? The way it bobs and spins? I’ve never seen someone uglier than you are, Yagami Hiro, and that’s saying a great deal. I feel almost compelled to kill you and split the remains so no-one will have to look at that level of ugliness, not even the ones unlucky enough to trip over the carcass you’ll leave behind.”

The buzzing worsened. Jhin must’ve been shouting by now.

“Frankly, I’ve never killed a man before, despite imagining many times what my blade would look like stuck in your throat as you sob and gasp for breath while I scour out your tongue, Hiro. You’re why I’m plagued by this awful noise. _Everyone,_ everyone but _her,_ is why I’m plagued by this awful noise. I’ve been so afraid, so scared of those thoughts, those dreams… all because of this **_AWFUL NOISE!_** ”

Hiro just jerked again, now putting himself beside the ravine. Jhin’s heart raced with heavy, baited breaths.

“I don’t like it when you look at me like that without saying anything, Jhin. Just put it away, okay?”

“I said…”

The knife fell. Jhin smiled. Hiro smiled. His hands were wrapped around Hiro’s jugular.

“When you speak, I want to skin you.”

He did not let go until Hiro’s head stopped moving beneath the waves.

A blur followed after that. Maybe Jhin leaned back and gaped, realizing what he had done. Maybe he had kept pushing, peeling, digging further into Hiro’s head until it wriggled out of its spinal column and sloughed off its collarbone, beset by rage. He remembered keening, cutting; he remembered picking the blade back up and leaving scissor cut after scissor cut in Hiro’s lumpy, fetid flesh. How determined he was to make it right. How determined he was to rip it apart.

Khada Jhin saw clearly only after he heard no more buzzing.

Aside from the severed head smiling plaintively at him from the ravine, he felt as if he were walking on air.

He crouched beside the body, staring such that he could notice every dip and twist that the head made as water rushed past. It looked funny— odd, slightly bloated, sections of scalp slipping out and turning the ravine beyond a shade of red dark as pitch. At once he reached for it. His hand stopped not at the lips, but only when he could feel teeth graze his knuckle. Then, straining slightly against the current, he curled his fingers and pulled it back so that the head landed on lap.

“Are you dead?” He asked.

It did not strike up conversation.

“If you are,” Jhin said, now balancing the head on his knees, “you’re much nicer dead than you were alive. You made that awful buzzing. I made it go away.”

He imagined how the head must’ve been smiling from the way he touched the mouth and did his best to match it. Even with no-one looking, he knew it was lopsided and forced.

It didn’t last for long. He was petting the sides of its ears now.

“No…” Jhin mused, squinting at where he dislodged the head posthumously from the body. The cut was serrated, not very good. His blade could’ve done better than that. He wished it were.

“You’re better looking, now. I don’t think I ever found you as anything but ugly as sin before this. I still remember when you came onto me in my tent last night. Qing overheard. I know he did. He’ll gossip like the cackling hen he is, and then…”

Jhin sighed, now looking at the sun yawning low on the horizon. He would have to leave very soon— the question, then, of whether to run or to return.

His nails strained on the head’s cheeks, expression melding to a grimace. The skin, soaked, did not ease easily. He tightened his grip. Eventually he could hear a loud _pop_ and and an internal, wet crunch. He smiled, no longer forcing it.

Then he launched both halves of the head into the ravine.

“I’m tired of running.”

One splashed, the other rolled with a splatter on the dry side of the grass. No less satisfied, Jhin stood up and started to hum as he reached into his tunic and pulled out his blade, still bloody with now flakey consistency.  He danced with his music even at he lacerated himself and cut near to the bone of his forearm. So merry while he ripped into his own clothes that he ought as well been skating on clouds. There was a derisiveness with every incision, every tear, a calculated measure impossible if not for that music. The music that drowned out everything, be it buzzing or pain or regret or fear.

Behind the curtain, it was the worst pain he had ever endured, and behind that was the fear, the regret; Khada Jhin sloughed it all off in that moment, that dance— because greater than the whole of his failing lied his sense of self preservation in her name.

More than a man who had ruthlessly killed in cold blood that ran out of the forest battered, soaked in blood and screaming for the heavens to open up, Khada Jhin remembered that head in the ravine as the day he learned what it meant to be pretty.


End file.
